The time to make positive changes in foreign language education programs and instruction has come. The first step in effecting change is to find out about the students' language backgrounds, interests, and intentions for their language skills. Language instruction can take many different emphases: foreign language and international studies,…

The Hebrew program at the State University of New York at Albany uses a variety of instructional approaches tailored to individual learning styles. A major program component is the use of 108 half-hour videotaped lessons that include opportunities for student response, graphics, and skits demonstrating and eliciting appropriate usage. Many of the…

A description of the status and role of English language use and instruction in Syria, in which English has been given the status of the first foreign language, is presented. The following topics are reported on: (1) general usage; (2) English within the educational system, including the length of English training, testing, syllabus construction,…

The relationship between intensive English programs (IEPs) for international students and the American colleges and universities that design, structure, staff, and administer the programs in diverse ways is adversely affected by an absence of policy and the inability of the faculty who teach these programs to participate in the policy-making…

The design of an effective reading course in English for academic purposes must be based on an understanding of the reading process (including perceptual skills and cognitive processing), an understanding of problems in mastering the English writing system (punctuation, decoding handwriting, and confusion between typefaces), and an awareness of…

English departments in Arab universities have been in an uncertain state from their beginning for lack of specific policy on the emphasis to be given to English or comparative literature, English or general linguistics, or a combination. Leanings toward English literature have always been evident, but course offerings and faculty recruitment show…

The approaches used for reading instruction in the United States and in the People's Republic of China are different and incompatible. In China, English reading is taught intensively, through close-reading or detailed oral analysis of brief texts and with great attention to individual words and phrases. This "bottom-up" processing style,…

One of the major challenges facing most departments of business administration is international business, a field that warrants expansion because of the world economy and because it is of increasing importance to most countries. One of the goals of any international business curriculum must be to establish awareness and understanding of the…

Business school faculty and language educators agree that the business school curriculum must be internationalized and that means must be provided for students to acquire facility in a foreign language. The use of traditional foreign language offerings to provide language skills to business majors has proven unsatisfactory. The traditional…

This paper describes a unit in undergraduate Spanish language and cross-cultural training for social workers, which includes both linguistic content and content concerning the cultural and human elements in the social worker's contact situation. The unit consists of: (1) a five-part case history concerning the school placement of a six-year-old…

A program and curriculum guide intended for teachers, counselors, and administrators concerned with English-as-a-second-language (ESL) instruction in Prince George's County public secondary schools is presented. The guide describes the intensive language program; academic and cultural problems often found within the school and related to the…

Polish university programs in English as a foreign language (EFL) contain a discussion course whose usual format is student presentations on an assigned topic of general interest. However, the communicative approach has made teachers more sensitive to the authenticity and suitability of the situations used for classroom role-playing. The approach…

A survey of the 20 most populous states concerning their secondary school provision of foreign languages for business is reported. State foreign language supervisors were interviewed for information on state policy or planning for the inclusion of foreign language for business or applied language studies, for information about specific programs or…

The literature concerning the corporate culture of the United States is a starting point for comparing the institutions of different cultures. However, teaching about the cultural context of business is not simply a matter of describing non-American companies in American terms, and American-born language teachers usually have little experience…

Designed as a teacher's guide to accompany the revised edition of the classroom text "English Words from Latin and Greek Elements," this manual contains the following material that is not in the textbook: (1) answers to all exercises in the text; (2) the Latin and Greek origin of all prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and bases that…